Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (22 page)

I open my mouth and I start talking real fast.
 
But of course, I am talking White Boy, and they don’t speak that language well enough to be impressed by my eloquence.
 
So I try to recall everything I’ve ever read about Puerto Rican kids in newspapers and books, and finally I come up with, “I always heard you PRs”—this was back when “PR” was a
polite
thing to call a Puerto Rican—“I always heard you guys were big on honor.
 
That was just bullshit, huh?”

That got their attention.
 
“What you mean?”

“Well hell,” I said, “how much honor is there in waving a knife at a guy who hasn’t got one?”

I was pretty pleased with that one.
 
And then José held out his hand, and one of his friends put another knife in it, and he tossed his to me.

I stepped aside and let it go by.
 
“Right,” I said.
 
“Fifteen or twenty to one.
 
That sounds fair.
 
Brave guys.”

“Don’t you worry about it,
maricon
,” José says.
 
“Just you and me, we dance, okay?
 
Nobody else.”
 
He looks around, and the biggest guy there says, “That’s right, man.
 
We just watch.”
 
Then he grins and says, “You kill him, we let you join the gang,” and everybody laughs and laughs.
 
And while they’re laughing, José Rivera starts coming at me, holding it underhand with his thumb and two fingers.

Well, I turned around fast and picked up that knife, but I figured I was a dead man.
 
I should have been.
 
This kid knew everything there was to know about knife-fighting.
 
I’d never held a killing-knife in my hands before.
 
But I had one advantage he didn’t know about.
 

My daddy could afford to buy me a TV set…
 

I’d probably seen more movies than José Rivera had ever dreamed of.
 
So I knew all about what the good guy does when the bad guy comes at him with a knife.
 
He quick slips off his denim jacket and he wraps it around his left arm and when the bad guy makes a pass at his giblets he catches the knife in the loose fabric of the jacket and he pushes forward and to his left and as the bad guy’s guard opens up he comes in low and fast and it worked like a fucking charm.

(
The Drink finished his beer, and stared into the empty tankard for a few moments.
)

You ever jam a butter knife into a stick of butter?
 
That’s how easy it is to put a sharp knife into a human being.
 
Clothes, hide, forget it, no feeling of resistance at all.
 
Until you’re in to the hilt, and then, Jack, you’re stuck fast.
 
Meanwhile you’re thinking funny stuff.
 
Jesus, now I’ve pissed him off; he’ll kill me
slow
now.
 
Maybe that’s what would have happened.
 
But José had his second piece of bad luck.
 
He was so startled, he stumbled.
 
Tried to go in two directions at once, I guess, and tripped over his feet.
 
His torso dropped about a foot before he could recover, and I felt the knife being tugged out of my hand and panicked and resisted, pulled the other way without thinking.
 
It had gone in a couple of inches below his belly button.
 
By the time he got his feet under him again it was flush up against his sternum.

Like I said, it’s funny the things you think.
 
The blood didn’t surprise me.
 
Even the intestines didn’t surprise me too much, though I remember they were lighter colored than I would have expected, kind of like Italian sausage before you cook it.
 
But for some reason the shit really surprised me.
 
I mean, you know intellectually that the gut is where shit lives, but somehow you just don’t expect to see it come out the front door.
 
They don’t mention that part in the movies.
 
When I realized there was shit on my hand as well as blood, I let go of the knife and wiped the back of my hand off on his tee shirt.
 
Two swipes.
 
One on each shoulder.
 
He looked down at them—not at his belly, at the two smears—and then he looked up at me and frowned and said, “Jesus Christ, man.”
 
Like, nice manners.
 
And then he died and then he fell down.

I’m not sure why they didn’t kill me.
 
I didn’t have the knife anymore.
 
I’d just killed their friend.
 
I am sure it had nothing to do with that honor and fairness bullshit.
 
My guess is they were just too astonished.
 
I just walked past them.
 
I thought about running, thought hard about it, but my legs wouldn’t work good enough.
 
Maybe that saved my life too.
 
I turned the first corner I came to, and the next, and the next, and I had to ask directions three times to find my way back to Penn Station.
 
They kept looking at me funny and repeating the directions several times.

If you gotta ride the Long Island Railroad, it helps to be in shock.
 
We were almost home, just pulling into Hicksville station I think, when I had my first coherent thought.
 
I’d been staring at my sneakers since Jamaica, trying to decide why they weren’t quite the same color.
 
Suddenly it dawned on me.
 
The left one was a darker black because blood had soaked into it.
 
The doors opened, and I got up and stepped out onto the platform and puked until my eyes watered, and then I went back in and sat down again.
 
And now the world had color and sound and live people in it again.

I know it’s hard to believe nowadays, but it actually made the
Daily News
the next day.
 
Dog bites man.
 
That’s how I learned José’s name.
 
I was hoping it would say he wasn’t really dead, just wounded.
 
I knew better, but I was hoping.
 
No such luck.
 
The luck part was it said the cops had no description of the assailant.

(
He tried to drink from his empty tankard, blinked at it and put it back down.
)

Well, you know.
 
You go over it and over it in your head.
 
You have to, because there’s nobody to talk it over with.
 
I hadn’t been to Confession in two years, and now didn’t seem to be the time to start again.
 
For two weeks easy I kept going over it and over it.
 
José’s address was in the paper too: five or six times I started a letter to his parents.
 
I wasn’t planning to sign it or anything, but it felt like something I should do.
 
But I was handicapped by the fact that I didn’t know their names, didn’t know if they could read English, didn’t know if he even had parents, and mostly didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what I wanted to say to them.
 
I went for a lot of long walks.
 
Around town; I’d had my fill of the Apple for awhile.

Anyway, one day I’m walking along this deserted stretch of 25A, and I’ve got tears running down my face, and this old clunker turns off the highway into a driveway right in front of me.
 
The driver just glances at me as he goes by, but then I hear brakes on gravel and a door slamming and he comes running back out the driveway after me.
 
We look at each other, and I’m trying to think of an explanation for why I’m crying.
 
And then he says, “Come in wit me, pal.
 
Ya look like youse could use a drink.”

It was Fast Eddie.

The next thing I know I’m standing in front of Callahan’s fireplace, listening to the echo of my glass breaking, and I’m telling a roomful of strangers the whole story.
 
And just like tonight, it comes out with Joey Bunch and José Rivera all mixed up together.
 
Pretty soon I’m babbling about Martians being dangerous.
 
It was the first time I ever drank anything stronger than ballpark beer.

And Tom Flannery interrupts me.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but when you tell about Joey Bunch you talk a lot about about how it felt.
 
And when you talk about José you talk about what happened.
 
How did you
feel
when he died?”

I was gonna get mad.
 
What a stupid question.
 
But while I was trying to think of something really cutting to say, the answer to his question popped into my mind before I could stop it.

For the first time since it happened I remembered the part I’d forgotten every time I’d gone over it in my mind.
 
Not the events.
 
Not the sights and sounds and smells and physical sensations.
 
Not how I felt before, or how I felt after.
 
For the first time I remembered how I felt as I did it, what I felt in that moment, when I realized I’d killed him.

It felt so good the only thing I can liken it to is orgasm.
 
The other guy did all the squirting, that was all.
 
It was heaven.
 
It felt like I wanted it to feel when I kicked Joey Bunch’s ass.

I told Tom that.
 
Told the whole bar.
 
I was too shocked not to.
 
I was a Martian and a monster, and I was tired of hiding it.

“Sounds like healthy human reaction to me,” Tom says.

I couldn’t believe it.
 
“
Healthy?
” I said.
 
“Are you nuts?”

“Listen,” he says to me, “that fight with Joey: what started it?
 
What was it about?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “It was years ago, for Christ’s sake, some typical Joey Bunch bullshit—”

“Why do you always use both his names?” Tom says.

And this flashbulb goes off in my head.
 
All of a sudden, it comes back to me.

Because there really is no reason I can explain to you, but
everybody
always called him Joey Bunch.
 
Not Joey, not Bunch, always Joey Bunch.
 
He just looked like a Joey Bunch, is the best I can say it.
 
Only, his father finally noticed that everybody called him that, and got pissed off.
 
He was in construction, and I guess to him it sounded too much like made guys he knew called Tommy Fingers and Paulie Large and so forth.
 
He gave the kid a lot of shit about not letting anybody call him Joey Bunch any more, and so pretty soon everybody knew you could get a rise out of him by calling him that.
 
And that morning at the bus stop, I’d just forgotten, and called him Joey Bunch without even thinking about it, from sheer force of habit.

And I tell Tom all this, and he says, “There, you see?
 
José Rivera had it coming.
 
Joey didn’t.
 
Even with a headful of adrenalin, you knew the difference.
 
I’m sorry to pop your bubble, son, but you’re not a Martian
or
a monster.
 
All you are is a pretty decent guy.”

And Callahan says, “For an Irishman,” and sends me another shot of Bushmill’s, and people cheer, and Fast Eddie starts playing “Mack the Knife,” and what with one thing and another I pretty much stayed at Callahan’s Place until it went by-by.
 
Nice place to hang out, until the Doc showed up.

***

 
“Til
I
showed up?” the Doc cried.
 
“I remember the night I first walked in.
 
You were telling everybody that Marcel Marceau was looking for a room to rent…and then you turned to me, a perfect stranger, looked me square in the eye, and said, ‘Brother, can you lair a mime?’
 
I almost turned around and walked out again.”

The room exploded in groans and laughter, a welcome relief.

“Bullshit,” Callahan said.
 
“You blinked at him, and said, ‘As long as it’s not a German mime.
 
A Hun is the lowest form of roomer.’”

Louder groans, mixed with a few feeble protests.

Long-Drink crowed.
 
“By God, that’s right, he did.
 
I’d forgotten that.
 
Big Beef McCaffrey fainted dead away.”

“Meadow muffins,” the Doc snorted.
 
“Big Beef paled a little bit, but he stayed vertical for another hour—until you perpetrated that Byzantine horror about the Middle-Eastern manure salesman.”

Long-Drink shook his head.
 
“I don’t remember it.”

The room held its breath.

“Would that I could forget it.
 
Let’s see…you started with that true story about the guy in the Civil War who got a testicle shot off, and impregnated a lady fifty yards away…only you specified that he was a German named Josef, and that the shot was fired by Scarlett O’Hara, and that the resulting child was named for his father.
 
Then, as I recall the atrocity, you alleged that the child grew to manhood, moved to the Middle East, and used a series of methodical burglaries to finance his vast manure empire—”

“Ah yes,” Long-Drink said reminiscently.
 
“The Haifa-lootin’, routine Teuton, son of a gun from Tara’s owner, big-time Cow-Pie Joe…”